Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Full Text (Footnotes omitted)

• In the first of those few entries in his journals clearly on the subject-matter of the chapter ‘Of Identity and Diversity’ (although the word ‘identity’ does not occur) Locke launched an attack on the doctrine of the natural immortality of the soul. The note begins with a statement of the ‘usual physicall proofe’ of natural immortaly: since matter cannot think, the soul is immaterial; since an immaterial thing is by nature indestructible (because indivisible), the soul is naturally immortal. Materialists, Locke continued, complain that animals have sensation, ‘i.e., thinke’, so that the same argument would prove that animals too have immortal souls. To this objection immaterialists have three possible responses ^Vo deny (with Descartes) that animals are anything more ..than ‘perfect machins’ to allow that they do have immortal souls, or to hold that God arbitrarily annihilates their souls with their bodily deaths. Locke did not say so, but Cudworth, whose book he had just been reading, also identified these three possibilities, preferring the second as being less implausible than the first, and more economical than the third. Cudworth argued that the hypothesis of animal souls is no more disturbing theologically than the accepted principle that any g substance, even matter, is naturally indestructible as such, since division is not annihilation. Locke in effect took up this point, but with a different purpose. The disputants ‘perfectly mistake immortality whereby is not meant a state of bare substantial! existence and duration but a state of sensibility’. Even the ‘manifestly false’ doctrine that the soul thinks essentially, and ‘dureing a sound quiet sleep perceives and thinkes but remembers it not’, could not save the argument for natural immortality. An eternally existing soul ‘with all that sense about it I whereof it hath noe consciousness noe memory’ simply fails to fulfil | the conditions of a morally significant afterlife. To all moral effects and I purposes it is dead. Since the consciousness and memory of its states a are contingent activities or modifications of the soul, their occurrence at any time ‘wholy depends upon the will and good pleasure of the first author’: immortality is a state of grace, not the natural state of the soul.
• Despite his use of the word ‘consciousness’, his emphasis on the importance of memory and other anticipations of II.xxvii, Locke’s position in this early note was far from that of the second edition. It was a familiar enough point that the Christian life-to-come needs to be more than the survival of a simple immaterial substance or soul. Descartes himself had felt obliged to postulate memory after death: although one type of memory involves the corporeal imagination, the more important type, he claimed, is a function of pure intellect. Henry More went further, holding that ‘the immediate seat of Memory is the Soul herself’: ‘All Representations with their circumstances are reserved in her, not in the Spirits . . . nor in any part of the Body.’ Indeed, ‘Memory is incompetible to Matter.’ For More, we shall have better memories out of our bodies than we currently have in them, for embodiment is itself analogous to the diseases known to cause amnesia. It was, then, widely agreed that, as John Tillotson (Archbishop of Canterbury and Locke’s friend) put it, ‘Immortality, when we acribe it to Men, signifies two things. 1. That the Soul remains after the Body. ... 2. That it lives [i.e. is active and conscious] in this separate state, and is sensible of Happiness or Misery.’ It may reasonably be supposed, Tillotson added, that the souls of animals, in contrast, ‘lapse into an insensible condition, and a state of inactivity’.
• Perhaps the most original and characteristic thought of that early journal entry is the suggestion that the trite issue of immortality (i.e. whether it is natural or an arbitrary gift to naturally mortal creatures) can be settled in effect quite independently of the issue between materialism and immaterialism. Even if the soul is immaterial and naturally indestructible, immortality properly understood is due to God’s special grace. Yet Locke’s neutrality on the issue of materialism remained clouded by his readiness to phrase the latter part of his argument in the terms of mind-body dualism. In the following year, however, he turned to the topic of personal identity without explicit reference to immortality, and this time his starting-point seems more favourable to the materialists:
  Identity of persons lies not in haveing the same numericall body made up of the same particles, nor if the minde consists of corporeal spirits in their being the same. But in the memory and knowledge of ones past self and actions (with the same concern one had formerly deleted) continued on under the consciousness of being the same person (under the certain knowledge deleted) whereby every man ownes himself.
  This remarkable note seems to be the first extant record of Locke’s decision that consciousness of continuity is not just a necessary condition of any continuity’s being ethically significant, but actually constitutes such continuity. It is as certain as these things can be that the particular context within which the thought occurred was supplied by the doctrine of the resurrection of the body, the topic of considerable controversy at the time.
• The difficulties for a literal interpretation of the doctrine were notorious, in particular the problem set by the possibility that many panicles might have been parts of more than one human body during the course of history. On one view, however, the matter of the body is unimportant: the same man or person would be resurrected provided only that the soul associated with the new body were the same. The ground generally advanced for this claim was that the soul can constitute the only real link, not only between a natural and a recreated body, but between the body of an infant and the body of an old man. Since the parts of a body are in continual flux, the principium individuationis can only lie in the immaterial soul. If this controversy did supply the context of Locke’s note, then he was making the following proposal: even if materialism is true, it is the same consciousness rather than the same corporeal substance which unites the natural with the resurrected body. This claim was to be repeated within the much wider argument of the second edition of the Essay.
• Soon after Locke’s note of June 1683, an idea very close to his played a public role in quite another context than the issue of immortality and resurrection, i.e. in the controversy over the doctrine of the Trinity which was later to flare up with particular heat, singeing Locke himself, in the 1690s. In 1685, John Turner, an ex-Fellow of Christ’s College, published a work critical of Cudworth which set out to explain ‘how it is possible for a plurality of Persons, distinct from one another, to be consistent with a Numerical Identity of Divine Substance’.
• The Father, Turner claimed, is the common divine substance or nature, and a person in its own right. The Son is such a union of the divine nature with human nature as constitutes a further distinct person, while the Holy Ghost is a similar union of the divine nature with ‘aetherial matter’. As a Cambridge Platonist, if a rebellious one, Turner thought of the omnipresent God as extended, having inseparable parts which are, as he put it, ‘all of them acted by the same Divine Life, which is one self-consciousness or self-sensation running through the whole, indivisible, inseparable and tyed to it self, by a Unity of self-enjoyment’. The thought seems to have been connected, both in content and origin, with Newton’s later suggestion that space might be, in effect, the sensorium of God. At the same time, Turner argued, the compound, ‘the human nature of Christ, vitally and personally united to the Divine of God the Father', possesses a self-consciousness which is logically distinct from the Father’s. Father and Son sometimes act and think in concurrence, but at other times the Father ‘acts as a Person distinctly by it self’.
• An important element in Turner’s argument was his analogy’ with what ‘we do all of us even’ day experience in our selves’, namely the ‘vital union of an immaterial nature to a material'. By this familiar union, matter ‘is made to taste and feel it self, to become the subject and seat, either of pleasure or pain, and to concur with [immaterial substance] towards the constituting of a common Person, resulting from them both’. There are some occasions, however, in which the immaterial substance withdraws from matter and acts on its own, namely in its purely speculative and intellectual operations. Although Turner seems to have accorded a more fundamental role to the material pan of us than Descartes ever did, his account is pretty clearly indebted to Descartes’ conception of the intimate, ‘substantial’ union of soul and body. It is, Turner claimed, even easier to conceive that two immaterial substances should achieve a similar unity-cum-duality: ‘for by a person nothing else is meant but a self-conscious nature, and therefore, where there is in two personalities a mutual enjoyment or feeling of each other’s life, there arises a compound personality'.
• We know from the journal entry of June 1683 that Locke did not need to read Turner’s book before arriving at something like Turner’s conception of a person, but that does not establish whether he was there applying to personal continuity an idea already in the air, or whether he was doing something more original. Whichever was the case, his acquaintance William Sherlock published a work in 1690, more incendiary than Turner’s, which constituted a definite link between the issue of the Trinity and the doctrines of the Essay itself. Sherlock advanced what is essentially Turner’s explanation of the Trinity, but without the metaphysical underpinnings. For Sherlock, as for Locke, we are entirely ignorant of essences. Hence ‘we know nothing of the unity of the Mind but self-consciousness ... as far as consciousness reaches, so far the unity of a Spirit extends’. Father, Son and Holy Ghost are distinguished by self-consciousness, but united by mutual consciousness. In these terms we can have an understanding of the Trinity which does not go beyond our own ideas: we need not pretend to know more about the divine essence than that God is an infinite mind. It is interesting in the light of later responses to Locke’s theory of personal identity that Sherlock explicitly rejected the ‘Sabellian’ view that the three divine persons are ‘Three Modes of the same infinite God, which is little better than Three Names of One God’. On the contrary, each person is substantial, ‘for a Person and an intelligent Substance are reciprocal Terms’: a claim which, as we shall see, is open to some question.
• Of the two allusions to the problems of identity over time which were present in the first edition of the Essay, the less interesting merely claimed that the disputes which have arisen in connection with the flux of matter, with the Neoplatonist doctrine of transmigration and with the doctrine of the resurrection of the body all go to show that, since men do not share a clear and distinct idea of identity, they cannot be supposed to share an innate one. In the rather longer discussion in the central sections of Essay II.i, however, the journal thoughts are woven into an extended criticism of the Cartesian doctrine that the soul always thinks. At the heart of this criticism is the Cartesian principle, which Locke of course accepted, that the subject of actual thought must be conscious of its thinking. If the soul were to ‘have its Thinking, Enjoyment, and Concerns, its Pleasure and Pain apart’ during sleep, then it would constitute a different person (or subject of consciousness) from the waking man 'consisting of Body and Soul’: ‘For if we take wholly away all Consciousness of our Actions and Sensations, especially of Pleasure and Pain, and the concernment that accompanies it, it will be hard to know wherein to place personal Identity.’ Locke added an illustration of this principle which is reminiscent both of Turner’s multiplicity of divine persons and of his ‘vital union’ of soul and body: if two Cartesian body-machines were by turns united with a single Cartesian soul ‘which thinks and perceives in one, what the other is never conscious of’, then that soul would go to make up, with the bodies, ‘two as distinct Persons... as Socrates and Plato were’.
• Each of the passages from the journals or the first edition so far considered anticipated in some respect the argument of the second edition chapter, ‘Of Identity and Diversity’, yet none embodied the contention which is central to that later argument, i.e. that the clear distinction between a person and a man is made possible by the formal analogy between life and consciousness' serving as two distinct principles of unity and continuity. Yet the first edition did foreshadow the man-person distinction in a significant context (discussed in chapter 15, above) when Locke defended the thesis that the real essences ‘of the Things moral Words stand for, may be perfectly known’ against the objection that the subject-matter of ethical theory comprises substances as well as modes, notably the substance man. He distinguished ‘’Man in a physical sense’ from ‘the moral Man’, defined as ‘a corporeal rational Being’. In the latter sense, a rational monkey would be a ‘man’. Only its rationality matters, and we know in advance that its other characteristics, including its underlying constitution, are irrelevant to its status as a moral agent subject to law. In the same way a mathematician may reason about ‘a Cube or Globe of Gold’, although the nature and constitution of the particular body is irrelevant to the reasoning. This last analogy will prove significant, but it is now enough to see that there was already in Locke’s mind, without any reference to identity, a distinction between the idea of man as a sort of animal, and the formal idea of a rational being which is appropriate to ethics.
• These, then, were some of the threads which Locke’s theory of personal identity was intended to draw together.